In March of 1879, Gerard Manley Hopkins was working as a parish priest’s assistant in Oxford, England. It was familiar territory for him, having studied Greek and Latin at Oxford from 1862-1867. In wandering north of the city, he came to the little village of Binsey, with which he had long been familiar. There he found, to his horror, that the long line of tall trees he was accustomed to seeing along the River Thames was gone; all had been cut down. He was so moved by this that he wrote the poem ‘Binsey Poplars’.
Binsey Poplars
Felled 1879
My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew –
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being so slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.
ANALYSIS
‘Binsey Poplars’ is a lament for these aspen trees which have been felled. The poem is divided into two stanzas: the first addresses the felling of the poplar trees themselves, and the second ponders man’s habit of destroying nature in broader terms.
Hopkins begins the poem by lamenting (with many instances of repetition and alliteration, and his trademark ‘sprung rhythm’) that not a single tree has been spared: ‘All felled, felled, are all felled’. Six words, but only three different words: ‘felled’ comes at us with the force of an axe, quickly chopping down these trees one after the other. The poem kind of likens the line of trees to a rank of soldiers and as soldiers are felled in war, the trees are felled by citizens and enemies of the land. The MILITARY IMAGE implies that the industrial development of the countryside is similar to a kind of warfare, which destroys humanity. Then, Hopkins draws attention to the trees’ interaction with the ‘leaping sun’: The trees’ “airy cages” means the intertwined leaf-covered branches, which sometimes made the bright sunlight more subdued (“quelled”), and sometimes blocked the sun rays entirely (“quenched”). By “leaping sun”, Hopkins may mean the illusion caused by the moving of branches and fluttering of leaves, which makes the light seen through them seem to leap from place to place; or he may mean simply the sun rising in the East and passing over the line of trees (they were oriented in a northwesterly direction) to sink again in the West.
The trees, Hopkins tells us, ‘dandled a sandalled / Shadow’ that either ‘swam or sank’ in the river (i.e. the shadow either appeared on the surface of the water or on the riverbed). The idea of the trees having ‘dandled a sandalled / Shadow’ is (with a kind of internal rhyme peculiar to Hopkins) a metaphor that likens the trees’ branches to somebody hanging their feet over the edge of the river, their sandals casting a shadow in the water. There is something serene and calm – and calming – about the poplars. But they are now gone, ‘felled, are all felled’.
The second stanza then contemplates this destruction of nature and how it is, in many ways, typical of mankind’s behaviour: we ‘hew’ and ‘delve’ (fracking, anyone?), we ‘Hack and rack the growing green!’ (There we get internal rhyme and alliteration in the same line.) Hopkins likens this wanton destruction to the way in which the delicate wonder of nature that is the eyeball (‘this sleek and seeing ball’) can, with a simple ‘prick’ from a pin or needle be turned into ‘no eye at all’. The PRICKING-THE-EYE IMAGERY is obviously designed to strongly shock us, to hit us right between the eyes (or rather in our very eyes): who is not extremely delicate and queasy around the idea of their eyes being harmed? To prick the eye even slightly changes it completely from what it was to something unrecognizable (and useless). It also likens the organs of sight, the eyes, to the beauty of the trees: one enabled us to enjoy the other, and both are capable of being snuffed out in seconds.
Indeed, even an action that is meant to be beneficial can affect the landscape in this way, Hopkins says. “Where we, even where we mean/To mend her we end her/When we hew or delve.” It reminds us that our responsibility to look after nature as a whole should be as keenly felt. ‘After-comers cannot guess the beauty been’: the people who come after the trees were felled would never know what beauty had once been there. Finally, it takes so little (only “ten or twelve strokes”) to “unselve” the landscape, or alter it so completely that it is no longer itself.
‘Binsey Poplars’ was not published until 1918, like so much of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s work. Nonetheless, we should note that though Hopkins knew poplars well poetically, he did not know them well, botanically. European poplars (Populus tremula) decline and decay within a period of about 100-150 years, requiring replacement by replanting, if one wants to maintain an avenue of them. In fact not long after Hopkins passed through the apparent devastation of the felled Binsey poplars, the trees were replanted. However, by 2004, the poplars at Binsey had again begun to decline, and so replanting was begun again. So in this case, the “sweet especial rural scene” was more resilient than Hopkins knew.
That does not, however, disregard the point of Hopkin’s poem, which is that humans should be more sensitive to Nature, to natural beauty, and to what is done to it. We can see what happens when humans abuse Nature in countless cases of destruction and disaster that are immeasurably more difficult to mend than the cutting of the poplars at Binsey.
Sprung rhythm is measured by feet of from one to four syllables, stressed on the first....and any number of weak or slack syllables may be used for effect...any two stresses may follow one another running or be divided by one, two or three slack syllables.'
References
https://hokku.wordpress.com/2014/09/16/the-beauty-been-hopkins-and-binsey-poplars/#:~:text=Shadow%20that%20swam%20or%20sank,sometimes%20blocked%20the%20light%20entirely.
https://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/hopkins/section6/
https://owlcation.com/humanities/Analysis-of-Poem-Binsey-Poplars-by-Gerard-Manley-Hopkins
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